Jack Chalker - Empires of Flux & Anchor

Certainly the start of the true mission is at hand, for I feel in the very air a changed energy, a tension that builds towards a nearly unbearable point. The ancient struggle continues, and perhaps, this time, the answers to all my questions may lie at the end of it.

They rode for some time in silence, Coydt deep in thought. Their pace was not fast, just deliberate, and she had no more doubts that what he had spoken about the Void was true. She had no idea how far they had come or how long they had been riding, for there were no landmarks of any kind. She was feeling nearly starved, but hesitated to mention it, fearing that it would betray some sort of weakness to these hard, strange men of Flux. She had the idea that any weakness demonstrated would lower their opinion of the one showing weakness a good deal, not to mention please them enormously. These were people who worshipped only power and liked it, no matter how small the crumb. She resolved that, no matter what, she would give them the smallest pleasure she could in that department.

There were many romantic stories and fantasies by Anchor folk of what the Flux was like, but nobody ever thought of it as unremitting boredom. Her three captors had totally relaxed upon entering Flux and getting some distance in, and now they barely paid attention to her, but she no longer felt like attempting an escape. The idea of wandering this terrible nothingness until you died of hunger or thirst, or were driven completely insane by it, was so terrifying that such an idea was unthinkable.

She had resigned herself to this captivity, at least for now. She didn’t know what they planned, but so far she’d not been harmed or even threatened, except with the consequences of escape. Some of it still had the quality of dream, as if this really couldn’t be happening to her, but she knew it was real and that these men were dangerous.

Finally they called a halt—the two adepts and she stopped and dismounted, while Coydt went on, either to check out what was ahead or to prepare something.

She looked around and saw only the nothingness. The horses looked tired and thirsty, as was she, but there were no packs, no saddlebags. Zekah, a thin young man she would have considered “cute” in another context, came over to her. “So—hungry and thirsty?”

She nodded. “No more than you or the horses.”

“Watch, then,” he told her, and turned away. He made a couple of hand signs and then pointed to a spot a few meters from them. A hole opened up—no, a cavity, perhaps four meters wide, and it filled very slowly and dramatically with clear water. He went over to it, knelt down, scooped up some in cupped hands, and drank. “Pretty good,” he decided at last. “Yorek—bring the horses over. You, too, girl. Take a drink.”

It was her first experience with Flux magic and she was impressed. She took her drink, then said, “That’s pretty impressive.” Maybe the aides could be buttered up a little, although she was being truthful.

“That’s nothing,” Zekah responded, turned back and waved his hands some more. Instantly a small table appeared with three chairs, and on the table was a veritable feast of food, hot and cold, as well as carafes of wine. She walked over to it in wonder, then hesitantly touched it. “It’s real !”

“Sure, it’s real. Come on—let’s sit down and eat before the boss comes back.”

It was the most bizarre dinner she’d ever had, a luxury feast in the middle of nothingness with two youthful kidnappers. Still, she ate with relish, not knowing from where and when the next meal would come.

Once satiated, the two adepts seemed in a good mood and she tried to pump them for some information. It was difficult to imagine these two as the brutal killers in the church, although it would never be possible to forget Coydt that morning.

“You just… wave your hand and it’s done?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Yorek responded. “Actually, it’s all math. The better you are with math in your head and the better your memory, the more you can do. Nobody can give you the Flux power—you either have it or you don’t. But if you have it, and the math skills and the memory skills, you have real power, and that’s what it’s all about out here.”

“Money means nothing—obviously,” Zekah put in. “Nothing means anything in Flux except power. The more you have and can use, the higher up you go. Now, the boss—he’s got power. More than anybody, I think. If he wants a castle with servants, he just wishes them up.”

She thought about it. “I would think that after a while being a god would get boring, too. I mean, what do you do after you have everything you want?”

“You’ve got the idea,” Yorek agreed. “That’s really the key to figuring the boss out. The only fun he gets is showing off his powers to others. We—we’re along to learn what we can from him, but he don’t think of us that way. People to the boss are just things—stick figures or cartoons drawn for his own amusement. Playthings. Even us.”

“I’d think you’d be a little nervous about that.”

“Not really. You see, we’re the one thing he needs in the whole world. We’re his audience. No use in power if you don’t have people around who can appreciate it. No, the only people he might think of as people are those with as much or more power than he’s got, and if he finds ’em, he takes ’em on. So far, nobody’s been stronger. That’s why the Flux bores him. He likes to spend most of his time in Anchor, where the power isn’t in the magic but in the head. He likes to win at anything, and he almost always does. Any time he doesn’t, he gets mean and nasty. Everybody’s scared stiff of him, even the rest of the Seven, mostly, I think, because he doesn’t believe in anything but himself.”

“He doesn’t believe in Hell, then? But I thought that’s what the Seven were about.”

Zekah smiled. “They are, and so’s he. But not like them. He says there’s nothing supernatural about Hell. It’s just another place filled with a lot of different kinds of creatures who think. A long time ago we and they fought a war over this place, and they lost, sort of. Maybe it was a tie. Anyway, the other side’s been stuck someplace, kept there by the gadgets on the Hellgates, and that someplace isn’t home. We’re in the way to where their home is. They want to go home now, but they can’t do it without coming through here. Since they invented the Flux, they know just how to work it, so there’s supposed to be a deal. Unlock the gates, let them go home, and in payment they’ll show the ones who let ’em out just how to fully use the Flux on a worldwide basis. That’s ultimate power.”

She shivered. “Even if it’s true, I don’t see why anybody should trust them. If I’d been locked away in prison for thousands of years, I sure wouldn’t be nice to the children of the ones who put me there.”

“That’s a good point,” Yorek agreed, “but you got to remember that the Seven are wizards like Coydt. They’re all tremendously old, hundreds of years, and they’re all very bored. They figure a gamble on something new is better than living forever like this. Maybe they’re right, I don’t know. As soon as it’s done, if they get the power, all of ’em will set out to wipe out the others and become sole god of World. That’s the only reason Coydt hasn’t taken them on. That and the fact that to unlock the gates you need a code, and each of ’em only has part of it.”

It was an unreal conversation, part fairy story and part nightmare. Sitting there at a sumptuous dinner in the middle of a void, the victim and her kidnappers were having friendly, casual conversation.